Jean-Raymond Abrial

Jean-Raymond Abrial (born 1938) is a French computer scientist and inventor of the Z and B formal methods.

J.-R. Abrial is the originator of the Z notation (typically used for formal specification of software), during his time at the Programming Research Group within the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, and later the B-Method (normally used for software development), two leading formal methods for software engineering. He is the author of The B-Book: Assigning Programs to Meanings (ISBN 0-521-49619-5). For much of his career he has been an independent consultant, as much at home working with industry as academia. Currently he is a Professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.